Fantasy alter egos. We've all got them. Truman Burbank led the the kingdom of Trumania from his shower and Dave Lizewski spandexed his way into being as Kick-Ass as he wanted to be. My alter egos have changed a lot over the years. When I was a child I was a black horse called Storm. Whinnying and jumping over bamboo poles in the garden took up pretty much my entire childhood. When I was a teenager I spent every weekend locked in my dark green bedroom imagining I was Jane Eyre. In my 20s, I've projected myself into characters and by playing Bel Rowley in The Hour, I've inhabited the life of a ground-breaking, game-changing female journalist of the 1950s. This is pretty much the best thing that has ever happened to me. And, for any of you women out there who are thinking you might want to trade up your present alter ego: try a few minutes of being Bel. It works wonders. Here are a few more great women who changed TV, both real and imagined.

Grace Wyndham Goldie

She was the woman that Abi Morgan, who devised and wrote The Hour, based Bel on. Grace Wyndham Goldie made television news in this country. She created the formats for anything we now recognise as serious, challenging television news journalism. Panorama, Tonight and That Was The Week That Was all came under her remit and changed not only the way television was perceived, but the very way that politics operates in the modern age. And all this in an environment that was largely devoid of women represented at anything over and above the tea-making level.

Bel Rowley (My Alter Ego – The Hour, 2011)

She's a well-educated woman approaching 30, an Oxbridge graduate at the time when that would still have been quite a rare thing. She's worked her way up through the ranks at the BBC, working in the news department, but at the beginning of the show, a lot of the news was about what the Queen was wearing at Ascot. There wasn't really the momentum or the desire to have a confrontational television news media. She's part of the generation that changed that. She's very courageous, but interestingly for me, also very ambitious. A film such as To Die For, which I love, is about a woman being ambitious with negative connotations, but Bel is someone who is career-minded, but not in a negative way, I hope.

Jane Craig (Holly Hunter – Broadcast News, 1987)

Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/20th Century Fox

Broadcast News and Network were the two films that Abi, the writer, and Coky Giedroyc, who directed the first two episodes of The Hour, were using as their influence for Bel. It's a slightly different kind of film, but as The Hour has a love story in it, and Broadcast News is in part a love story, it was an influence for that side of things. Holly Hunter really explores the vulnerability of being in a position of authority as well as being ambitious, and having to deal with the egos of the men around her. It's an amazing, influential performance, but also a moving love story, too.

Liz Lemon (Tina Fey – 30 Rock, 2006–Present)

I love 30 Rock. Absolutely love it. It's a game-changing show. Liz is a very funny character but she's not weak, and that is amazing, for a woman to have jokes that she's in on, as well as just being the butt of them. It's the archetypal story of a woman in a position of power, battling against the expectations she puts on herself. It's a contemporary concern, those pressures to be a certain way, to always appear professional and competent. A lot of the comedy comes from her struggle with that, and I think that's something they explored in The Hour; Bel is constantly trying to project an image of herself as very competent in situations where she feels very insecure and vulnerable.

Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway – Network, 1976)

Photograph: Warner Bros

Faye Dunaway's performance as a woman working in the shark-infested waters of TV news is unparalleled. Network is one of those seminal 70s movies, from a time when people were only beginning to realise the massive effects the media could have, particularly rolling news. It's one of the depressingly few films to have portrayed a woman in the workplace, detailing Christensen's ambitions and the fierce desire she has for career success. She is powerful, morally ambiguous, and quite apart from that, also the kind of woman who responds to the line "I don't do anything on the first date" with the phrase "We'll see." Legendary.